Three UH Archaeology Students Receive Prestigious National Science Foundation Fellowship

The National Science Foundation announced on Friday, March 15, 2002, the new recipients of the three year Graduate Fellowship Awards and among the approximately 900 awardees are three UH archaeology students. Two of these students, Kacy Hollenbach and Britt Shepardson, are first year graduate students in the Department of Anthropology at UH Mānoa. Ms Hollenbach earned her B.A. from the University of Arizona and is attending UH Mānoa, specializing in the archaeology of Southeast Asia,. She is working with with Associate Professor, Miriam Stark who has on-going funded field research in Cambodia at the pre-Angkorian site of Angkor Borei. Mr. Shepardson earned his B.A. from Claremount McKenna College, California. He is currently working with Associate Professor Terry Hunt on his on-going research on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Both students are interested in the processes leading to prehistoric social complexity. The third student, Christina Kanani Paraso, earned her B.A. (with Honors) in Anthropology at UH Mānoa in 1997. She wrote her Honors Thesis, under the direction of Dr. Michael Graves on the rock art from the island of LānaŌi. Since graduating Ms. Paraso has been furthering her field research experience in Samoa, Palau, HawaiŌi, southern China, and France. Ms. Paraso has been admitted to the Universities of Washington and Arizona, along with Boston University and is interested in studying the mid-Pleistocene adaptations of humans in parts of East Asia. She has worked several seasons on a joint research project involving archaeologists from the United States and from the People‘s Republic of China.

The NSF Fellowship is a three year award that pays about $21,000 annually as a stipend to the student and reimburses their graduate institutions for a substantial portion of their tuition and fees. These awards are extremely competitive. There were fewer than 45 awarded in all of anthropology in this cycle, and only 17 were for archaeology students. With three awards, UH Mānoa ranked second, only to the University of Michigan, in the number of archaeology student recipients. The Anthropology Department at UH Mānoa has been particularly successful in garnering national fellowship awards for its students within the past 10 years, including the NSF Graduate Fellowship, Ford Foundation Minority Predoctoral Fellowship, and Jacob K. Javits Fellowship.